Lawrence, A[rnold] W[alter] (referred to
himself simply as "Lawrence")

Date born: 1900

Place born: Oxford, United Kingdom

Date died: 1991

Place died: Devizes, Wiltshire, United Kingdom

Historian of ancient Greek sculpture and architecture and the
history of fortifications. Lawrence's older
brother was the medieval scholar and popular desert hero T. E. Lawrence
("Lawrence of Arabia") (1888-1935), under whose shadow the younger Lawrence
remained. Like his brothers, A. W. Lawrence was conceived out of wedlock,
a huge stigma at the time. Their parents were Sir Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman
(1846–1919) and Sarah Junner (1861-1959) who assumed the names "Thomas Robert
Lawrence" and "Sarah Lawrence" to raise their children jointly. The Lawrence
boys were raised in Oxford by the intensely religious Sarah, resulting in
Lawrence's outspoken anti-religious stance ("All religion is vermin" he once
said). He attended the City of Oxford School before New College, Oxford,
graduating in 1921 with a diploma of Classical Archaeology. Lawrence
was a student at the British Schools at Rome in 1921 and then at Athens (through
1926). In 1923
Lawrence worked on the excavation of Ur (where he discovered he did not want to
be an excavator), directed by C. Leonard Woolley (1880-1960),
and under whom T. E. Lawrence had excavated at Carchemish
before World War I. Lawrence married Barbara Inness Thompson (1902-1986) in 1925. A chance visit to the museum in Alexandria on his return trip to England convinced
him that the city could not have been (as was commonly
stated) the leading center of Hellenistic sculpture. Lawrence used his
fellowship as the Oxford Craven
student to write the 1927 book Later Greek Sculpture and its Influence,
setting out this thesis in a bold fashion. This early revisionist work did
not gain immediate acceptance. In 1929 he published a second work on Greek
plastic arts, Classical Sculpture,
which became a standard survey for the next generation, though Lawrence lacked
sympathy for the Archaic style. Nevertheless, the book led to his appointment as
Laurence Reader in Classical Archaeology in Cambridge University in 1930. His
wide-ranging scholarly interests resulted in the 1931 Narratives of the Discovery of America.
In the 1930s when part of the Avebury megaliths site was threatened by
development, Lawrence used his personal funds to buy the land in order to
preserve it. Lawrence caused a minor scandal in 1934 by having a
"sun-worshipper style"
bronze nude statue of himself, sculpted by Lady Kathleen Scott, placed at the entrance
to the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, near a larger statue of the
Virgin Mary outside a nearby Catholic church. After his brother's death on
a motorcycle in 1935, Lawrence became the literary executor; this took
considerable time from his scholarly production. It also stimulated an interest
in fortifications of which T. E. had been a specialist; for the rest of A. W.'s
life, he would research ancient fortifications. In 1936 Lawrence's first
revision of Rawlinson's Herodotus translation appeared with notes by Lawrence.
In 1937 he edited a book on his brother, T. E. Lawrence by His Friends.
During World War II, Lawrence served in a variety of capacities, though none
which he found satisfying to the war effort. He was elected to the
Laurence Chair of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge in 1944 (succeeding Alan J.
B. Wace, 1879-1957). He was awarded a Leverhulme research fellowship in 1951 to
study ancient and medieval fortifications in classical lands. Somewhat
surprisingly, Lawrence resigned his Cambridge chair the same year to become the
first professor of archaeology at the University College of the Gold Coast
(modern University of Ghana). He was appointed Secretary and Conservator
Monuments and Relics Commission of Ghana in 1952. At the university, Lawrence
founded the museum (and became its first director), organized the classics
department and restored local fortresses. He donated a bust by his friend,
Jacob Epstein, to the National Museum of Ghana. Lawrence had not escaped
British attention, however. While in Ghana, He was
asked by Nikolaus Pevsner (q.v.) to write the volume in the prestigious
Pelican History of Art series on Greek architecture. It appeared in
1957. In it, Lawrence departed from the traditional encyclopedic survey
format, preferring instead to stress the continuity
Aegean architecture as a series of developing styles, beginning with prehistoric architecture.
A passage relating religious attitudes toward architectural function of the
Greeks, was actually written, Lawrence said, to describe the mentality in the
West African bush (!). He retired in 1957 to Nidderdale, Yorkshire, UK, and
where he wrote Trade Castles
and Forts of West Africa,1963. The same year he and his wife moved near Biggleswade,
Bedfordshire. Lawrence returned to the British School at Athens as visiting fellow in 1967.
In 1972 he published another book on classical sculpture, Greek and Roman
Sculpture. At age 80, Greek Aims In Fortification a book for which he
was uniquely qualified, appeared in 1980. His A Skeletal History Of
Byzantine Fortifications, despite its title a large work, was published by
the British School at Athens in 1983. Lawrence's published scholarship on
fortifications in the classical era thus spanned from prehistoric
systems of the Aegean to the medieval crusader
castles of the Levant. In 1985 Lawrence was interviewed for a BBC Omnibus
production by Julia Cave and Malcolm Brown about T. E. After the death of
his wife, Lawrence's final years were shared with Peggy Guido (1912-1994), an
archaeologist previously married to the archaeologist Stuart Piggott
(1910-1996),
living together in Devizes,
north Wiltshire. Lawrence was completing a new revision
of his earlier annotated edition of Rawlinson's Herodotus when he died in 1991.
The manuscript was never completed.

Both Lawrences, T. E. and A. W. were architectural historians (T. E. wrote a
monograph on crusader castles). Like his famous brother, Lawrence was a shy
man--resulting in what students called his appallingly bad lecture style--who
had spent much of his life avoiding publicity. Described as one of the
last great traditional archaeologists, A. W. Lawrence's interest was more in art
and architecture, than excavation or reconstruction of the ancient environment.
Brown described him as "the sort [who] do not even suffer wise
men gladly." Lawrence spent much of his non-academic life renouncing various
characterizations of his more famous brother. These included Richard Aldington's
sensationalized disclosure of their illegitimacy in 1955, the 1962 David Lean film
Lawrence of Arabia (Lawrence withdrew
his support and refused the movie the use of the title Seven Pillars of
Wisdom because of what he termed character distortions of not only his brother but also of Allenby),
and the Times (London) 1968 revelation of T. E.'s masochism.